乔布斯是如何被改变的

译者 qjopinion

As seemingly everyone on the planet knows, Steve Jobs’s defining quality was perfectionism. The development of the Macintosh, for instance, took more than three years, because of Jobs’s obsession with detail.  He nixed the idea of an internal fan, because he thought it was noisy and clumsy. And he wanted his engineers to redesign the Mac’s motherboard, just because it looked inelegant. At NeXT, the company Jobs started after being nudged out of Apple, in 1985, he drove his hardware team crazy in order to make a computer that was a sleek, gorgeous magnesium cube. After his return to Apple, in 1997, he got personally involved with things like how many screws there were in a laptop case. It took six months until he was happy with the way that scroll bars in OS X worked. Jobs believed that, for an object to resonate with consumers, every piece of it had to be right, even the ones you couldn’t see.

好像地球人都知道，乔布斯对质量的要求近乎完美。比如麦金托什计算机，就因为乔布斯对细节的执着，才使得它的开发花了三年多的时间才完成。他觉得电脑加内置风扇是愚蠢的行为，而且会产生噪音，所以他否决了这个想法。他还会要求他的工程师重新设计Mac的主板，就仅仅因为他觉得那主板看上去比较粗糙。在1985年被苹果公司扫地出门后，乔布斯开办了NeXT公司。在NeXT，他要求他的硬件小组把电脑设计成一个光滑精致的镁盒，这几乎把他的硬件小组给逼疯了。1997年他回到苹果公司后，就连笔记本电脑需要多少个螺钉他都亲自过问。OS X操作系统里滚动条的工作方式，做到他满意花了6个月的时间。乔布斯相信，一个商品要与顾客产生共鸣，必须每个细节都精益求精，即使是一些你看不见的地方也不能放过。

This perfectionism obviously had a lot to do with Apple’s success. It explains why Apple products have typically had a feeling of integrity, in the original sense of the word; they feel whole, rather than simply like collections of parts. But Jobs’s perfectionism came at a price, too. It could be literally expensive: back in the eighties, Jobs insisted that in magazine ads and on packages the Apple logo be printed in six colors, not four, which was thirty to forty per cent more expensive. And there were more important costs: Jobs’s vision required Apple to control every part of the user experience, and to make everything it possibly could itself. Its hardware was proprietary: the company had its own Mac factory and favored unique cables, disk drives, and power cords, rather than standardized ones. Its software was proprietary, too: if you wanted to run Apple software, you needed to own an Apple computer. This made Apple’s computers more expensive than the competition. It also made them hard to customize, which businesses didn’t like. So, while Apple changed the world of computing in the eighties, with machines that were more user-friendly and powerful than your typical I.B.M. clone, most users never touched a Macintosh. They ended up with P.C.s instead.

这种对完美的执着很大程度上造就了苹果公司的成功。这就解释了为什么苹果的产品给人的感觉就是完整。就如同字面的意思，它们感觉生来就是个整体，而不是一些零部件的组装。但是，乔布斯的完美主义也付出了代价。代价的确很大：回顾80年代，乔布斯坚持在杂志广告和包装上，苹果公司的标志必须用6种而不是4种颜色印刷，这增加了30%-40%的成本。更主要的成本在于：乔布斯的执着使得苹果要控制用户体验的每个部分，并尽可能都自己制作。这使得苹果的硬件都是独一无二的：他有自己的电脑工厂，比起那些已经标准化的东西，他更偏爱独一无二的数据线、硬盘和电源线。苹果的软件同样也是独特的：如果你想要使用苹果的软件，你需要拥有一台苹果电脑。这使得苹果的电脑比竞争对手的产品要贵得多。同样，这也使得苹果的产品难以自定义，企业都不喜欢难以自定义的产品。所以，在80年代，苹果虽然改变了计算机产业，使得电脑摆脱了简单的IBM模式的克隆，而功能更加强大且更加用户化，但绝大多数用户从来就没用过麦金托什电脑，他们最终都选择了PC。

When Jobs returned, he still wanted Apple to, as he put it, “own and control the primary technology in everything we do.” But his obsession with control had been tempered: he was better, you might say, at playing with others, and this was crucial to the extraordinary success that Apple has enjoyed over the past decade. Take the iPod. The old Jobs might well have insisted that the iPod play only songs encoded in Apple’s favored digital format, the A.A.C. This would have allowed Apple to control the user experience, but it would also have limited the iPod market, since millions of people already had MP3s. So Apple made the iPod MP3-compatible. (Sony, by contrast, made its first digital music players compatible only with files in Sony’s proprietary format, and they bombed as a result.) Similarly, Jobs could have insisted, as he originally intended, that iPods and iTunes work only with Macs. But that would have cut the company off from the vast majority of computer users. So in 2002 Apple launched a Windows-compatible iPod, and sales skyrocketed soon afterward. And, while Apple’s designs are as distinctive as ever, the devices now rely less on proprietary hardware and more on standardized technologies.

当乔布斯回到苹果，他要求公司做到，就如同他所说的，“拥有和控制所有产品的原始技术”。但是，他对于控制的执念已经缓和了很多：他在与别人共事时，比原来更容易相处了，这是苹果过去十年辉煌的决定性因素。拿iPod来说，原来的乔布斯可能会坚持iPod只播放苹果偏爱的编码格式（AAC）的音乐。这样虽然能让苹果掌控用户体验，但这样会限制iPod的市场，因为成千上万的人都用MP3格式。所以，苹果让iPod兼容MP3格式的音乐。（相比之下，索尼一开始的音乐播放器都只能播放索尼自己的编码格式，这使得索尼付出了惨痛代价。）相似的，他原本想让iPod和iTunes只能在Mac电脑上使用，但这样会让公司远离绝大多数电脑用户。所以在2002年，苹果开发了与windows系统兼容的iPod，并很快在随后销量猛增。同时，苹果的设计也和原来不同，比起依靠专有的硬件，它的设备如今更倾向于使用标准技术。

The iPhone signalled a further loosening of the reins. Although Apple makes the phone and the operating system itself, and although every app is sold through the App Store, the system is far more open than the Mac ever was: there are more than four hundred thousand iPhone apps written by outside developers. Some are even designed by Apple’s competitors—you can read on the Kindle app instead of using iBooks—and many are so inelegant that Jobs must have hated them. Such apps make the iPhone messier than it would otherwise be, but they also make it much more valuable. The old Jobs might well have tried, in the interest of quality, to contain the number of apps: he always talked about how saying no to ideas was as important as saying yes. Though Apple does vet apps to some extent, the new Jobs essentially said, Let a thousand flowers bloom.

iPhone的限制更少。即便苹果给手机开发了独立的操作系统，而且所有的应用软件只能在App商店购买，但这个系统比Mac电脑更加开放：有大约10万个iPhone的应用软件是由公司外的开发者编写的。其中有些软件甚至是苹果的竞争对手设计的——你可以不用iBooks而用Kindle的应用软件在iPhone上看电子书。有些应用软件如此粗糙，乔布斯肯定恨死它们。这些应用软件可能使得iPhone不像它应有的那样精致，但这同样也使得它更有使用价值。原来的乔布斯肯定会出于质量的考虑，反复验证这些软件，并对软件数量加以限制：他经常说对创意说不要比说是更加重要。虽然苹果对这些软件在某种程度上进行检查，但新乔布斯和他原本说的那样，让它们百花齐放。

The introduction of the iPad has ratified this new reality, since developers have already released more than a hundred thousand apps for the tablet. The result is that the network effects that worked against Apple in the eighties, making it essentially a boutique company, are now working in its favor: the more apps Apple’s products have, the more people want to use them, which, in turn, makes developers want to develop for them, and so on.

iPad的推出证明了这个新现实，因为开发者们已经为这个平板电脑开发了超过10万个应用软件。结果就是，使得80年代那个追求精品的苹果公司失败的网络效应，现在使得它更受欢迎：苹果的产品拥有更多的应用软件，就有更多的人使用它们，同样的，使得开发者们为他们开发更多的应用软件，如此良性循环。

There’s no doubt that Apple’s success in the past decade depended on Jobs’s uncanny ability to introduce products that captured the zeitgeist. But what turned Apple into the most valuable company on the planet was that Jobs did more than just create cool new devices. Rather, he presided over the creation of new market ecosystems, with those devices at their heart. And if the ecosystems were more chaotic than he might have liked, they were also more powerful and more profitable. It’s true that, by the standards of today’s open-source computing world, Apple’s platforms are still very much closed. After all, when Google designed a phone operating system, Android, it simply handed it out to phone manufacturers to use as they liked. But, by the standards of its old ethos, Apple is much more open than one would ever have thought possible. In giving up a little control, Jobs found a lot more power. ♦

无疑苹果近十年的成功归功于乔布斯那不可思议的能力，他推出的产品代表了一个时代。但是，让苹果成为全球市值最高公司的原因，不仅仅是因为他创造好的新产品，而是因为他主导创造了新的市场生态系统，让他的产品更加深入人心。如果这个市场生态系统比他原本希望的更加混乱，那也将更加强大，更加有利。在通常都公开计算机源代码的今天，苹果公司的操作平台的确还很闭塞。最终，Google设计出一个手机操作系统Android并简单地将它交给手机制造商们，让其随意使用。但是和苹果原来可以想象的老标准相比，它已经开放的多了。只是放弃了一点点控制，乔布斯就找到了更多的力量。